19 Facts About Nuclear fission

Nuclear fission is a reaction in which the nucleus of an atom splits into two or more smaller nuclei.

Apart from Nuclear fission induced by a neutron, harnessed and exploited by humans, a natural form of spontaneous radioactive decay is referred to as Nuclear fission, and occurs especially in very high-mass-number isotopes.

Spontaneous Nuclear fission was discovered in 1940 by Flyorov, Petrzhak, and Kurchatov in Moscow, in an experiment intended to confirm that, without bombardment by neutrons, the Nuclear fission rate of uranium was negligible, as predicted by Niels Bohr; it was not negligible.

Nuclear fission produces energy for nuclear power and drives the explosion of nuclear weapons.

The products of nuclear fission are on average far more radioactive than the heavy elements which are normally fissioned as fuel, and remain so for significant amounts of time, giving rise to a nuclear waste problem.

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However, the seven long-lived Nuclear fission products make up only a small fraction of Nuclear fission products.

Neutron absorption which does not lead to Nuclear fission produces Plutonium and minor actinides whose radiotoxicity is far higher than that of the long lived Nuclear fission products.

Nuclear fission reprocessing aims to recover usable material from spent nuclear fuel to both enable uranium supplies to last longer and to reduce the amount of "waste".

Nuclear fission can occur without neutron bombardment as a type of radioactive decay.

In engineered nuclear devices, essentially all nuclear fission occurs as a "nuclear reaction" — a bombardment-driven process that results from the collision of two subatomic particles.

Nuclear fission reactions are thus driven by the mechanics of bombardment, not by the relatively constant exponential decay and half-life characteristic of spontaneous radioactive processes.

The result is two Nuclear fission fragments moving away from each other, at high energy.

The energy of nuclear fission is released as kinetic energy of the fission products and fragments, and as electromagnetic radiation in the form of gamma rays; in a nuclear reactor, the energy is converted to heat as the particles and gamma rays collide with the atoms that make up the reactor and its working fluid, usually water or occasionally heavy water or molten salts.

In Nuclear fission there is a preference to yield fragments with even proton numbers, which is called the odd-even effect on the fragments' charge distribution.

The excess mass is the invariant mass of the energy that is released as photons and kinetic energy of the Nuclear fission fragments, according to the mass-energy equivalence formula.

Critical fission reactors are the most common type of nuclear reactor.

Critical Nuclear fission reactors are built for three primary purposes, which typically involve different engineering trade-offs to take advantage of either the heat or the neutrons produced by the Nuclear fission chain reaction:.

Two other Nuclear fission bombs, codenamed "Little Boy" and "Fat Man", were used in combat against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9 of 1945.

Discovery of nuclear fission occurred in 1938 in the buildings of Kaiser Wilhelm Society for Chemistry, today part of the Free University of Berlin, following over four decades of work on the science of radioactivity and the elaboration of new nuclear physics that described the components of atoms.